I vividly remember first getting an iPhone in 2008, the sleek white box and packaging was so exciting and inviting. Pulling the shiny black mirrored device from its snug packaging was as peak 2000’s as it got. I was sat in a cool coffee shop and felt so relevant and modern.

I had spent months berating the iPhone and any iPhone users as crass and cold capitalism at its worst. But then i was given one as part of my job as a music manager in a club, i had an in to the select club, so i needed it now and had the perfect excuse to join this unique clique.

It was an iPod, a high resolution camera, email, social media manager, diary and the list went on. It justified itself in its scope and soon i had forgot my scorn and disdain. I needed the iPhone and i felt it needed me.

If you have seen the film Hellraiser by Clive Barker you will understand this analogy. The iPhone felt like if you used it in the right way it could open heaven and infinite joy, but, used in the wrong way it could literally tear your soul apart. In the film Hellraiser a puzzle box can supposedly open the gates of heaven or send you straight to hell, the trick of the puzzle box and the demons who you summoned up was that heaven and hell, pleasure and pain were the same thing. This puzzle would always ‘tear your soul apart’ in an infinite hell of your own making. The iPhone, not yet be-known to me, was this portal to infinite hell.

Soon the phone was integral to my working and social life. I would arrange meetings, manage the clubs’s i worked for social media channels and take artsy snaps of my young son playing. All the while i knew lurked the fact that i was addicted and saw life coming through the phone now. I forgot a time when i didn’t have this technology at hand. The seamless way it would see a date in my texts or emails and suggest to add it to my calendar. The ease with which you could screenshot and send photos. I was fully addicted and so were most people i knew who had one.

As a musician it was easy to argue i needed this phone as a tool of my trade. It recorded audio beautifully and made it easy to throw a poster or flier together using one of the many free app’s. Musicians always prefer Apple products as we used the Mac in any decent studio to record. Apple corporation owned the Musicians soul and we gladly obliged by drip feeding our psyche into their devices.

As the years went on i would dutifully upgrade to the latest model and incorporate the new features into my working and social life. I began to notice an anxiety around the device early on, but like a drug addict would ignore the subconscious warning signs. I’d feel panic if I didn’t have it on me. Id reach for it when sad and looking for some inspiration or doom scrolling on my fave news apps. Still I didn’t heed the internal disquiet that told me i was heading towards a hell of my own crafting.

I would regularly drop my iPhone and smash the screen and so would begin a game of using it whilst smashed and putting off getting it fixed, all because i needed my fix and a day or two in a repair shop would mean financial cost and withdrawal pangs. I would use the smashed phone and watch as the screen disintegrated day by day. Small cuts on my fingers would not deter me from my spiralling addiction.

In 2015 my attachment blew into full blown addiction. The band i was in had recorded a live music video of a song called ‘Dance With The Devil’ and it unexpectedly took off in a way we didn’t foresee. The CEO of Gibson guitars happened upon it and invited us to Las Vegas, Los Angeles and then Frankfurt to play at their trade show stand at the biggest trade shows in the world. This sequence of events led us to meet Eddie Kramer of Jimi Hendrix fame and ultimately land us a record deal with V2 records. Heaven had arrived and I ignored the impending hell that I knew was soon to come.

Over a period of around 4 or 5 years we went from strength to strength. Opportunity poured through the portal of the iPhone and every week would bring a new exciting advancement for the band. By early 2020 i was stood on stage with Glastonbury’s Michael Eavis and we had won a chance to play Glastonbury festival that year. Little did i know that the virus that had tore through China and Italy would soon ruin everything and take me to the very edge of madness.

It was at that competition i had been furiously scrolling through news and social media channels on my iPhone watching the crisis unfold. The buffet laid on for the bands scared the shit out of me. It looked like a sure fire way to end up catching COVID-19 and i was stuck in my head the whole night. The excitement of the evening was instead terror to me. I could sense that the busloads of people shipped to the Wirral, for covid-19 quarantine not 6 miles from my house, was not the end of the story for me and my circle.

Within a week or so and before the UK government’s lockdown, i had locked down and cancelled all gigs. I’d gone to the local Tesco and bought bulk amounts of flour, pasta, rice and not toilet rolls. The mood in the supermarket was schizophrenic, some people doing their usual weekly shop, whilst others exchanged knowing looks over their bulk-buy filled trolleys. I felt an uneasy panic interspersed with excitement at living through what I perceived to be the end of days.

It was during this period my relationship with my phone switched quickly to an infinite and all encompassing hell. As stats and scientific journals poured from the internet into my crumbling mind, I felt a dark and twisted feeling I hadn’t ever experienced. My thoughts quickened and it was like my processing power had gone from 4G to 5G in an instant. I consumed huge amounts of news and at one point was watching or reading about 10 hours of news in any given 24 hour period.

As the lockdown progressed my sanity crumbled and i worshipped at the altar of the iPhone for all information and advice. I argued on the bands large social media platforms about Covid-19 and what I thought needed to be done. I shared angry posts berating lockdown sceptics and conspiracy theorists. The anger towards conspiracy theorists was further confused by the fact that me and my brother had been avid followers of David Icke and Alex Jones, we even played at some conspiracy conferences. I now hated all these people stood for as my fear and terror of Covid19 grew. As my sanity completely left the room I became furious at my still avidly conspiracy minded brother. This culminated in him ejecting me from the band and revoking all my access to the bands social media platforms.

So there i was, kicked out of the band and no access to the reach the band had on social media. I was furious and repeatedly reached for the fucking iPhone to try and make sense of what i saw in the world. I would phone people all day long and impotently implore them ‘to think of ideas to get us out of this mess’. I would sleep on the sofa so i could watch 24 hour news and shout at breakfast tv from 6am.

At one point in the summer of 2020 during the conspiracy drenched anti-lockdown, anti mask and anti government protests, i used an instagram account i had made to guide a crowd of protesters straight away from the action and straight into a police barricade. I was rabid with my obsession and the iPhone enabled it all. I felt mentally and physically ill every minute of every day but had no awareness of how sick i had become and how the iPhone in my hand had led through the gates of hell.

Almost two years into this crisis and my iPhone feels dead. No one calls or texts, i have no big social media following. I have deleted facebook and Instagram, as i feel they are the more toxic for me and my mental health. I have a modest twitter account where i reach out for help and make connections to try and understand my Bipolar disorder. Recently through the Bipolar Club i have been blogging, something i used to look down on and feel was contrite or self indulgent, this makes me feel ashamed as I’m gaining so much relief from the torture of my mental state from the very thing I thought was self indulgent and silly.

So in conclusion i would like to say that the iPhone for me has been an addiction, a compulsion, a necessity, a hinderance, a joy, a weapon which destroyed and fixed my mental state in equal measure. It has been a gateway to heaven and a slippery slope to hell. The common denominator in every upgrade of handset has been me and my fractured mind. I’d recommend watching Hellraiser and bearing in mind these ‘tools’ we use can end up using us and throwing us away. The craziest thing is that I say this, all the while blogging away on a fucking iPhone! And i hate blogging, or did until I realised it helps me make sense of the infinite hell in my mind and maybe more importantly helps others.